Has anyone seen where it was mentioned how many sites and for how long data was collected?
Thanks for the reminder. I have to double check this: I believe that East Anglia (CRU) was tasked by the international community to gather and archive ALL country’s climate data, and that many of those countries turned all their raw records to CRU. IF this understanding of mine is correct, the raw data is gone gone gone, and can not be recovered, unless somebody somewhere has a 9-track or disk file that they copied a particular country or data station to while they were examining that particular part of the data.
It seems I might have been in error that CRU was officially tasked with the record keeping. If someone else discovers that they were, please ping me. Right now, from what I’ve found, it seems that most countries maintained their own database.